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The vines are everywhere, right across the landscape; fresh green leaves covering the country in spring and summer, swooping down into valleys and right up and away to swathe the distinctive conical hills. It almost hurts your eyes to look at the bright, verdant vineyards in May. Aptly enough, the vine that blankets the area is called glera.

It’s not a well-known variety, but glera gives us one of the world’s best-loved wines – frothy, refreshing, lemon-sherbetty prosecco. Last year global sales of the Veneto’s classic sparkling wine exceeded even those of champagne, but unlike the Champagne region, the heart of prosecco country remains relatively undiscovered, despite its ancient castles and bell towers, excellent restaurants and mild, sunny climate. The peace is more surprising when you consider its proximity to Venice, just one hour’s drive south.

Tomorrow will be a particularly busy time for visitors, who come to sniff, swirl, sip and sashay around the annual Vino in Villa prosecco festival, held at the impressive 13th-century castle of Santo Salvatore in Susegana on the third Sunday of each May. This is the heart of prosecco country, just north of Treviso, near the two key wine-producing towns, Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, which, most would agree, produce the very best labels.

Vino in Villa is not any old prosecco party. The basic sparklers of the region can be made across a wide area of the Veneto, but those labelled Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore are from this patch, generally better quality and more sought-after (and expensive). The festival shows off around 300 of these from more than 100 wineries, and the castle’s great doors are open to all-comers.

It’s an elegant, sociable affair with optional workshops, tutored tastings and a sommelier competition. Cured meats and local cheeses are served from white tents on the castle lawns, while the wines are kept cool inside the great stone halls in frosty silver ice buckets. Views from the castle are said to have inspired the Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Battista Cima. Last year, after a lot of tasting and talking, and a strong espresso or two, I walked back to my hotel in sunshine mixed with light rain. Everyone carries an umbrella here, as gentle showers are common; that greenery comes at a price.

But while it’s a great time to plan a visit, you don’t have to come to the festival to make the best of the Veneto and its wines. I also travelled like everyone else, by car, up, down and around those strangely contoured hills, zigzagging the hairpin bends, in what has been described as the “garden of Venice”. You can visit many wineries at most times of year, though you should plan ahead and make an appointment. Don’t expect commercial tours in the Tuscan/Bordeaux/Champagne style (although one of the most accessible and beautiful stop-offs, Villa Sandi, offers a more organised visit with a guided trip around its 17th-century Palladian HQ and into the atmospheric 300-year-old cellars before a tasting – €5/£3.60).

Elsewhere, our visit couldn’t have been more rural, or humble. We came across a tiny bar in the middle of nowhere, just an ancient converted cowshed, right up in the hilly vineyards with a view I only hope Cima discovered. It was unmanned, but a couple of smiley locals sitting outside pointed us to the fridge containing ice-cold prosecco and a few pieces of wrapped cheese and ham, a chained box nearby to take a few euros. We grabbed a quick glass, fed the till, marvelled at the birdsong in the steep vineyards and moved on.

According to Desiderato Bisol, fourth-generation winemaker at the Bisol winery, this used to be a holiday area with Valdobbiadene the cultural centre. That was back in the late 19th century when wine and silk were two famous regional products. Mass emigration and two world wars almost completely destroyed the town (it is said that only two buildings survived the wars) and today Conegliano is the prettier of the two wine centres, with its own castle. Master of wine and Italian specialist David Gleave of Liberty Wines describes Conegliano as “one of those classic, northern Italian towns, well maintained and affluent”, though it’s also full of students studying at the famous wine school, “and their optimism and energy bubble to the surface, especially in the local osterias”. Valdobbiadene is where many of the modern wineries are based, however, and a trip to prosecco country should take in both.

It was after the Second World War that a group of returning soldiers, all from winemaking families, decided to rebuild the fortunes of the local trade by concentrating firmly on sparkling wine, made quickly in tanks and released young, not long-aged on the yeast in the bottle like champagne and other richer styles. It was a wise decision. Prosecco’s popularity today is in part due to its simplicity – the floral scent and palate-wakening citrus, peach and melon flavours – and its low price, mainly due to the easy method of making it in tanks (see “Prosecco notes”) and glera’s relatively high yields.

Bisol paired his wines over dinner in Valdobbiadene’s central Dobladino restaurant with local game, rabbit and pork, pointing out how the clean acidity of the fizz cut through the fat of the meat. It worked surprisingly well, but in four days of sampling regional dishes, which might be chestnuts and mushrooms, asparagus, various risottos, beans and potatoes depending on the season, I didn’t find a better match than a delicate subtle fagottini di crespelle con sciopet su fonduta di latte – crepes stuffed with mild cheese sauce with fresh green herbs – that we had for lunch at Belvedere Da Tullio in the pretty, high-up hamlet of Arfanta di Tarzo. Another fine stop-off is the Salis restaurant, right in the middle of vines in the heart of the Cartizze region (see “Essentials”) and with an impressive wine list.

At the Bortolomiol winery I learnt about Giuliano Bortolomiol, one of those key figures who returned to a poverty-stricken, devastated Valdobbiadene in 1945 and devoted his life to creating a better future through sparkling wine. He co-founded and headed the local confrérie of winemakers and his eponymous winery is still flourishing today, based in a converted silk mill and run by his widow, Ottavia, and four daughters. The grounds of Bortolomiol now hold an organic vineyard, sculptures and a small amphitheatre for concerts. The family produces 1.8 million bottles a year and, as Giuliano’s daughter Elvira takes me through the winery, it’s poignant to think of the women who sat here in the past, grafting hard to make silk stockings before the mulberry trees were replaced by vines.

“There aren’t enough hotels here” was a cry I heard from several prosecco producers and, indeed, my hotel in Susegana (the Astoria, on the suitably named Via Vigna) was one of very few I saw. It’s well run, though a bit Eighties. Other accommodation can be found in rustic locandas (inns) and more farms have started to open rooms, b&b-style. “Agritourism” is talked of with much optimism and seems a sensible way forward.

In a telling moment on my return, at Venice’s bustling Marco Polo airport, I got talking to a few British tourists who regularly visited the city, yet hadn’t a clue that the prosecco they drank there came from the cool, hilly area just an hour to the north. They might go there for a day or two next time, they said, now that they knew. But for the moment, the heart of prosecco country remains peaceful, unspoilt, quietly friendly and very unassuming, almost shy, despite the extraordinary recent success of its sparkling wine. Every single person there seems to be involved in prosecco production, making or selling it, or perhaps just growing a few vines in the garden. Or more than a few – that glera gets everywhere.

Prosecco notes

More than 380 million bottles of prosecco were made in 2014 in the Veneto region of north-east Italy. Most are labelled DOC (denominazione di origine controllata) and come from a wide area. The higher-quality wines tend to be produced around the towns of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene and are labelled DOCG (DOC e garantita) with one or both of the town names and the word superiore on the bottle. These usually come from older vineyards with lower-yielding vines and have pure, fruity scents and flavours of citrus, peach and melon. A total of 79 million bottles of DOCG prosecco were made in 2014.

The main grape must be glera, although small amounts of other local white grapes are allowed. Prosecco is produced by the “Charmat” tank, or Martinotti, method. After the first fermentation, the base wine is put in tanks where yeast and sugar are added. This triggers the second fermentation, and the bubbles of carbon dioxide are trapped in the liquid, which is bottled quickly, not aged for long on the yeast lees like champagne.

This is a sparkling wine to enjoy while it is young, ideally as the Italians serve it in large, long-stemmed, tulip-shaped glasses, not flutes. It tends to have low alcohol levels (11 per cent) and can be “brut” (the driest style), “extra brut” (confusingly, a little off-dry) or “dry” (even more confusingly, slightly sweeter).

The finest proseccos are made from fruit grown in the Cartizze region, 107 hectares of land in the commune of Valdobbiadene, and labelled as such. Single-estate proseccos are often labelled with the name of the rive, or place, where they originate and are sought out by serious prosecco lovers.

Getting there

Susy Atkins stayed at the four-star Hotel Astoria in Susegana (hotel-astoria.com; doubles from about £95 per night, including breakfast). For agriturismo see agriturismo.it. To read about our recommended hotels in Venice and details of how to get there, go to telegraph.co.uk/venice.